Kanye’s style progression over the years.

Kanye West’s albums have seen a significant shift in style over the years. Especially in his latest works, such as Ye and Jesus is King, which are a lot slower and differ a lot from the explosive sounds of Yeezus and Watch the Throne. To get a better feel of how much his style changed, we will look at his albums’ danceability and energy values. The values come from the Spotify API and are described as follows:

“Danceability describes how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements, including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity. A value of 0.0 is least danceable, and 1.0 is the most danceable.”

“Energy is a measure from 0.0 to 1.0 and represents a perceptual measure of intensity and activity. Typically, energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and noisy. For example, death metal has high energy, while a Bach prelude scores low on the scale. Perceptual features contributing to this attribute include dynamic range, perceived loudness, timbre, onset rate, and general entropy.”

Looking at the plot below, both the danceability and energy have dropped significantly in the last couple of years.